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I have embarked on Arabic. It is a language I have next to no prior knowledge of. It has a very unfamiliar alphabet, some unfamiliar phones, and do not know a lot about Arab culture.

As a language teacher, I am very interested in putting my claims about language learning to the test.

For me, the first rule to learn any language is to listen, and concurrently not worrying about learning meaning too quickly.

I am currently listening to a 1 minute long piece from a news site. I have listened to it at least 100 times.

I am resisting the urge to look for meaning in reference works at the moment. I am treating the listening as if it were a purely sonic adventure.

When I listen, I note my attention settling on clues that my brain can possibly relate to prior or global knowledge: pauses for new sentences, pauses for emphasis, a rising tone for a question. A sharp rise-fall-rise for an important idea. One or two words borrowed from English or other familiar languages jump out. Other groups of sounds remind me of English words... or just jump out at me without any apparent reason. But I am not sure if they even considered words in the original Arabic.

I have taken to pausing the listening at those groups of sounds and recording my pronunciation of them in a voice reorder, as well as the time in the recording that they appear. I have a vague idea that I will come back to them at some point. But I am not sure.... to be continued.

Today I was able to sit at the computer, attach my voice recorder, and look up all the sound groupings I had noticed. I was pleasantly surprised to find that they all more or less corresponded to single words. At least they were all single "content" words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs), although they sometimes were associated with a few "function" words (prepositions, conjunctions, articles and the like). To do this, I listened to my imitation of the sound cluster, located it using the recording and transcript on naturalarabic.com, and found the meaning using the word for word English rendering on the same site.

That site provides a lot of resources. including an alphabetic transliteration which was already separated into words. I could have just imported that and LingQed it, learning the meaning and the approximate sound through the transliteration.

I decided against that for the following reasons. 1) I wanted to immerse myself in the sounds of Arabic. Using the noticing method I mentioned above facilitated that. It allowed me to notice all kinds of sonic qualities of the language. I found myself really loving the sounds of Arabic. I find it has a lovely, lilting sound with a slight undertone of bitterness and/or distress, a nice broad palette of emotional undertones. It seems like a language to tell a story with. 2) I wanted to use connected speech as a basis for learning Arab alphabet. I am planning on LingQing the Arabic script in the near future, then puzzling out the Arabic alphabet based on the words themselves. 3) I enjoy the discovery process. It motivates me because I feel like I am an explorer in new territory, making my own maps. I am pretty sure the thrill will eventually go away and I will start to use readily available resources such as alphabets and transliterations. But in the meantime I want to nurture the sense of being dropped into a foreign land, without preconceptions.

What I have found so far is that the need for meaning and anchors is strong. It was hard not just go ahead and LingQ the transliteration. It was torture, at first, to listen to the torrent of sounds, even though it was only about a minute long. I imagine the process would have been much harder were I a real explorer, for example, a Christian missionary in the New World, trying to learn Algonquin. I regained an appreciation for the IPA, because without a digital voice recorder and a computer, it would have been invaluable. And I still might use it. However I feel like the my method is helping my appreciation for the language in and of itself, and not just as a tool for communication of meaning. I think that in the past I have over emphasised the function of language to the detriment of feeling its beauty.

First, thank you for all of your encouragement. I feel grateful and even more motivated!

The last few days have been busy with work and family taking precedence. However I have just had a about 90 minutes of precious free time to continue studying.

I have continued my 'sonic' journey, but in a much more methodical and goal oriented fashion, by extending the listening from the train and bus, where it had been happening exclusively before, into the study. Having a really good feeling for the listening but not knowing the details of the meaning, I uploaded the mp3 to Audacity and am in the process of cutting it up into word bites with the help of the Arabic transcript and word for word English translation in naturalarabic.com . (I am not trying to promote this site. But it happens to be a great tool at the moment.) I am exporting each word as a separate mp3 file and the name of each file is its English meaning and the Arabic equivalent. So with each word file I have a triad of Arabic sound, Arabic script and English meaning.

In doing this I am also learning the Arabic alphabet... slowly. Every time I isolate a word in the Audacity file, I locate the word in the transcript and then try to mentally break the sound up into its alphabetic constituents. I then try to locate the individual, alphabetic parts of the written word in a great site called "Learn Arabic Online". The alphabet page I have found most useful: http://www.searchtruth.com/arabic/lessons/unit1... . I also found this video useful as a general review:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANIoxAxruys ----three cheers for the internet :)---

This whole process is very painstaking. I sometimes hear a very practical voice in my head saying: "Aww jeez, just upload the Roman alphabet transliteration to LingQ and be done with all this chop-chop- chopping." I may yet do that for subsequent articles. But this is still fun and I feel like I am really tuning my ear to the sounds of Arabic. Plus, the Arab alphabet itself is more or less phonetic, so why not just learn it and be done with it?

A surprising side benefit I have noticed is that when I listen to Japanese cartoons, which is my habit when spending time with my son, I swear I am hearing more than I did when I was studying Japanese. Japanese speech that sounded too elided to really understand now reveals itself to me. It is great! Like I am training my ear to hear any language more precisely.

By the time I am finished this particular article, I will get going with making sound flashcards... probably with Anki. My current goals are to get to the point that I can sound out most words more or less accurately, without using audio as a back up. This will free me from the sound flashcards and allow me to use LingQ more. I will post again when I am finished the current article.

... and Part 4As happens so often, in refining my goals I have changed my practices. I see this as a good thing, although it sometimes get quite chaotic doing new things all of the time.

In my last entry I said I wanted to get a handle on the pronunciation of the Arabic vocabulary. To be precise, I want to use a language slot in LingQ to learn Arabic.

But to use LingQ you need to be able to listen for words. You have to be able to feel the flow of words as you listen to the audio without transcript. It is essential to me because I consider listening only fruitful for learning if you have that “word” awareness. It is helpful to think of listening as a kind of super fast flashcarding, where all you get is the sound of the word, and you either know or you don’t, and you don’t get any feedback other than that sense of “knowing”.

To listen for words, you have to be able to think in terms of "words" when you are listening. One way is to follow along the transcript while you are listening and recognise when words start and finish. It also helps to be able to recall the sound of the word by looking at the written form when you study flashcards.

I was on my way to achieving that goal using the painstaking method of chopping up sound bytes from the audio and making audio flashcards in Anki. But, soon after my last entry, while looking around the naturalarabic.com website, I found the quiz function. Basically it is like a built in audio flashcard function that covers every word in the article. It starts with the word and its audio, and you have to choose from among 4 possible answers for its English meaning. WOOOHOO… I immediately stopped reinventing the wheel, and just went through the quiz.

In addition to guessing the English meaning, I would try to break up the written form of the words in to letters and check myself on http://www.searchtruth.com/arabic/lessons/unit1...I also would copy/paste the target word into Google translate to compare the machine pronunciation to the human one.

This practice was an extremely good way to familiarize myself with the sounds of the alphabet in connected speech, But it also raised many questions about how the alphabet worked. How do you know the vowels? Why are there so many seemingly unpronounced letters? Why do some letters (final TAA for example) have more than one pronunciation? etc

which is a tutorial for the Arabic alphabet. I am now in the middle of it, while still listening to the same audio while commuting, and doing and redoing the quiz.

While I am happy to use this tutorial, I am relieved that I had a chance to immerse myself in the sounds first. I can already see that it has some limitations--- its explanation of “stacking” and the word “Laam”, to just name 2. But it is still a good explanation to supplement my direct experience of the sounds.

I am also getting familiar enough to get something out of the Wikipedia entry for the Arabic alphabet.

So, I just need to get to the point of “listening for words” when I am listening. To do that within the naturalarabic.com website should be relatively easy. But to be able to sound out all unfamiliar words with 70% accuracy is my next sub-goal. This should be achievable within the next few weeks if I am able to take time to study….

**********************************************************************************************Since the last entry, there has been a huge disaster in Japan. I am indirectly affected as I am married to a Japanese national, and I have in-laws living in the affected areas. Luckily they are all ok and not gravely injured like so many others. I am amazed at the positive and energetic response of the Japanese people. I hope... no... I KNOW the country will survive this and continue to be a great culture, as well as an inspiration to the rest of the world.

Long Time ago, Arabs to talk one common accent which is the Modern Standard Arabic.. Now every country have a different dialect, but usually Arabs can understand each others accept people from Morocco or from Tunisia, since they have a hard dialect that we can't fully understand it. Modern Standard Arabic is being in schools, so who doest go to school or people who cant read or write don;t know Modern standard Arabic... I know Modern Standard Arabic, and my dialect is Lebanese ..

I have found a great new resource, Arabicpod.net The beginner resources are free. Each lesson targets a short dialog of about 10 seconds and maybe 20 words which cover many and varied situations. The beginner resources alone consist of about 160 such dialogs.

These materials are perfect. Short enough that I don't get bored and I can almost memorise each dialog as a unit. I have downloaded the audios (editing out the English explanations) and I am in the process of importing them to an unused language slot in LingQ. The Arabic script works fairly well in LingQ. Since the transcripts all include English translations, I don't need to use the dictionaries.

I have also found that Arabic scripts usually do not include the vowel sounds. You must guess them from grammatical context or from memory. So the script is less reliable than I thought as a source of pronunciation. That, plus the fact that the sound aspect of the flashcards do not work in LingQ for Arabic, has forced me to include word transliterations in the hints. They are not perfect but they at least let me know the vowel sounds. I am, however, familiar enough with the Arabic script now that I am not reflexively relying on the transliteration. I believe this is going to help my pronunciation.

Arabic contains a few velarised and pharyngeal sounds that do not exist in English. I am not too worried about them because I have always listened to connected speech and I can see how short they are in the grand scheme of things. The odd time I have cracked a pedagogical book I am always surprised at how seriously these sounds are taken. I think there is sort of cultural pride that wells up when people teach their own language that causes small peculiarities to become emphasised completely out of proportion.

So I am finally LingQing away and building up my Known Words. I am on my way.

What I would suggest for LingQ from this:

Each language should have 100 or so SHORT beginner lessons... 10 seconds or so... 20 words or so. These lessons should be ideally translated to all other languages. All languages should have a sound hints and there should be links to resources explaining how the alphabet relates to the sound.

"Would you want to see a story line run through these short lessons envisaged by you?"

I would rather energy be put into other things. The most important point would be to keep it short. I would say 20 words max. I would prefer dialogues to have a mini-story arc within themselves rather than across dialogs, since you are more likely to listen to them out of order. sort of like haiku. I would also like many quite random and eclectic scenarios: " waiting for a taxi with your boss on a rainy evening" and not just the usual greetings goodbyes etc

I would also say that beginner lessons should have pre made 'LingQ-packs' ie flashcards. It would be a lot of work to prepare them, but I think it would be less scary to start with those for the average beginner. Once this stage is finished they would be able to understand the concept of LingQing much more easily.

dooo, there are a few changes coming up next week that will help beginners. Let's look at those and then see about LingQ packs. I am not against the idea, although I do not know how it would work. But let's talk next week, and let's move this discussion over to the thread that Sanne started.

I don't know why when most people just get to learn arabic they learn it as a textual language.. by the way we (arabs) never use the formal one in conversations !! just we use it to in school to pass tests & i think it's the same thing at english..if you want to learn english you must listen to informal spoken english and never get to study grammer , and about the dialects i think every arabic country has its own dialect but it's much difficult as most learners think.! =)

That's cool..but you need to train on listening to informal arabic just to know more slangs and idioms = )

April 2011

[[lovelanguages]]0

Wow, this thread is really inspiring. It is this kind of enthusiasm for languages that made me come here in the first place. Thanks for sharing your passion with us. I look forward to reading more about your "Arabic adventure".

April 2011

[[James123]]0

I put my arabic journey aside for a bit because I am currently concentrating on Russian. I problem I faced was that I couldn't work out how to join characters. I can write them (I still have the link you posted on a different thread), but can't join them. Have you got any resources to learn to do so?

I decided in advance that I would not learn to handwrite Arabic. There is no big need for it in this age of virtual keyboards eg http://www.yamli.com/

My goal was to learn to sound out words. This requires I only recognise the characters. I then use transliterations (Arabic with familiar alphanumeric script) to fill in any vowels that are not present. This transliteration is what many Arabic speakers use to text message and type in computers anyway.

@James123 If you do enjoy handwriting (I think it is a great aide), there are plenty of beginners books around which show you how some of the letters change when you use joint-up writing (there's generally a table showing the letter according to whether it's at the beginning, in the middle or at the end.) There must be tables like that floating around in the ether?

One of the best ones I have come across is The Macmillan Arabic Course. I have both books, but don't know whether they are still in print.

One of the best ones - I meant: one of the best courses I have come across ...

May 2011

[[James123]]0

I'll look out for it. I've tried looking for such charts which tell you how to link everything and the way characters are formed, but they either just show them formed in isolation or aren't suited to me. It may sound boring but for me it is quite fun writing in a different alphabet.

I understand that fascination. Handwriting also helps some people to deepen their learning. My son writes his scripts always by hand before typing them up.

May 2011

[[hodifa]]670

hello all of you , hi Mr, Dooo i think we can help each otherm how ?i will tell you>>>> i really need to learn english and i read alot about how to learn english but till now i am not sure that i can speak english well with people because i live in arabian country and no body is here to practice with, so i think maybe if we talk to each other daily or whatever maybe you will get the benefit from me and i will get the benefit from youand i will appreciate that. i dont know wether this idea work with you or notand i want you and all people here to tell me how is my english now ?? is it good enough?if no body understand what i write then i will know that my english still need more improve to make me a biggenerthank you

@James123: I think YouTube may be our very present help in times of need. Try, eg http://bit.ly/jAIQ4k.

Russians laugh at my handwriting too. Fortunately they very rarely get subjected to it.

May 2011

[[AlgolianSuntiger]]35022610

Edward, since you are learning arabic with another LingQ language, did you find any way to make google translate pronounce your flashcard word in arabic instead of the 'other' LingQ language ? Is there any way we could explore this option. Since google translate already has this option pretty much figured out, it would be just be a matter of expanding the drop down menu's on to make for a correct pronounciation IMHO. Maybe we can get Steve to chime in on this.Thx in advance

On Windows and Chrome, I right-click the "speaker" icon on the flashcard and then left-click "open in new window". Then I get a black audio player window. The URL of that window has an "it" in it which represents the language the player is being told to pronounce. I change that to "ar", press enter, and the player plays the Arabic translation. I am using the Italian slot for Arabic.

On Ubuntu and Firefox the "speaker" icon is just a picture, it is not a link to anything. I am not sure why. In that case I just keep the google translate window open and copy-paste.

Both are not great solutions. I wonder if there is a way to tweak the source code on the flashcard page to make it work.

I am still in the beginner stages, still making lots of mistakes decoding the script, still learning basic words, but I am enjoying myself.

One of the objectives of this exercise was to refine my outlook on learning languages by trying a completely unfamiliar one from scratch. I just want to mention one revelation for me.

Until recently, I was very dependent on transliteration of the sounds of Arabic words. I needed to see the vowels written out since they are so often omitted or variable. I would put a transcription in every Hint.

What I have come to realise is that I do not need to do that, despite the inherent vagueness of the script. Instead I prefer to listen to 10 to 20 second dialogs over and over while looking at the words, either in the lesson or as flashcards, and train my ear to hear the word I am focusing on as part of flash-carding. I find this much more satisfying and I think I learn just as quickly.

Now I am going to start Chinese for a while just to test this out. No pinyin for me,... just training my audio memory :)

For me, however, I think every Arabic country has far too many vocabularies which quite different from another one. In addition, you keep in mind that every Arabic country has its own accent. On top of that, if you make a comparison between the accents of the countries whose native language are English, you will spot that they are quite different . And likewise, Arab countries, whose languages are Arabic.

April 2012

[[Ginkgo58]]376100585144

Hi @ dooo,

Good idea. I had started that way myself with Chinese some time ago. I might just get back to it!

One thing that didn't seem to come up in this thread is that to learn "Arabic" in terms of the 4 competencies (reading, writing, speaking, and listening) you really have to learn two somewhat distinct languages. Modern Standard Arabic (based on Quranic Arabic) is used as a sort of lingua franca for formal written communication (newspapers, legal texts, etc.). It is also used in formal spoken contexts such as newscasts, speeches, etc. However, as some have pointed out the pronunciation will vary according to the speakers country of origin.

In contrast, the language spoken on the street is very different than formal Arabic. In some countries, the spoken language is more similar to the formal than others. Morrocan Arabic, for example is practically an entirely different language, while Levantine Arabic is much closer. As someone mentioned above, people rarely converse in MSA. I would say the exception is when you have two Arabic speakers from different countries. For example, I have a Morrocan and Egyptian friend who converse mostly in MSA.

What does this mean for a language learner? Most formal Arabic programs suggest beginning with MSA because it give you a foundation in the language which will then help you learning a spoken dialect. However, you will not learn to speak/understand anyone on the street, though you may understand the news. Likewise if you want to read learning a dialect won't help you much at all (unless you learn one of the dialects closer to MSA).

So, you really have to make a decision about what your goals are and choose the version of arabic that will give you the quickest results. Just keep in mind that unless you learn both MSA and a dialect, you'll be limiting yourself to either speaking or reading. Also, if you choose a dialect, you'll have to pick the region you want to focus on (Maghrebi, Egyptian, Levantine, etc.)

Of course, the above is a simplification, but it should help avoid some of the confusion at the beginning.